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“No,” said T’salle, the translation device making their words sound vaguely robotic, “There’s no way that’s true. I’m not paying up.”
“No way what’s true?,” Kekxeral settled themselves on the bench across from me, a nutrition pack in their grip. They looked back and forth between myself and T’salle.
“We made a bet,” I said, “about who could think of the craziest thing their species had done to survive.”
“And I, of course, told the story of M’elanth. They were shipwrecked and ate nothing but roots on an island for three days before rescue. Their digestive system was never the same again, but they lived,” T’salle explained. it was often hard to interpret the facial expressions of their species, but I’d been around the water-world species long enough to know smugness when I saw it.
“Why do you always do this to the new people?,” Kekxeral leveled a flat stare at me. With his species it could mean amusement or resignation or a weird mix of both. They turned to T’salle, “I bet then she told you that there were several varieties of root that are regularly consumed by her people?”
“Yeah, I told T’salle about potatoes,” I said, smirking.
“Ok, then let’s have it, what terrible, horrifying feat did you counter with?”
“In the early 21st century there was this guy who went hiking–”
“–because apparently climbing on rocks is fun. No one climbs on rocks in the wilderness for fun,” T’salle made a gesture that was their species’ version of an eyeroll.
“Some humans do,” I shrugged, “ANYWAY, I was telling T’salle about this guy who went hiking and a boulder fell on his arm, trapping him for a five days with only a bottle of water and two burritos.”
“What’s a burrito?,” asked Kekxeral.
“It’s like…you know those sandwich wraps I eat sometimes? It’s like that but with meat and cheese and some other stuff in it,” Kekxeral shuddered at my mention of the meat. Their species couldn’t eat it, “He ran out at the end of the fourth day, and so he started drinking his own liquid waste to survive. Then, since his crushed arm had started rotting, he cut if off with a dull pocket knife and used the torque from the rock to break the bones.”
“Tell Kekxeral the rest,” T’salle grumbled, still clearly skeptical that this was a real story.
“He climbed the rest of the way out of the canyon and down out of the valley until he met a family who called for help.”
“Oh yeah,” said Kekxeral, “Sorry T’salle, but that one’s true.”
“Ha! Pay up!,” I held out my com so T’salle could fling me the money.
Grumbling under their breath - a sound that the translators turned into little more than electronic static - they sent the money over and said, “How do you know it’s true?”
“Because human-Andy likes to tell self-mutilation stories to newbies, and when I was new, she told me the same story,” Kekxeral explained. I grinned and listened, knowing what was coming next, “And when I doubted the truth of it she didn’t just make me read the old news-reels, she made me watch the entire hour-and-a-half long torture scene that is the movie they made after the fact.”
“A…movie…?,” T’salle said, their confusion clear.
I shrugged, “We love a good, heroic survival story.”
“T’salle, since you’re young and this is your first assignment, I’m going to give you some advice,” Kekxeral said, leaning forward and gnawing on one of the nutrition packs, “Earth is a death-world. Don’t bet against a human when it comes to survival.”